Hello! Have some suggestions to make :P

Is it possible when you iconfy the root dir of a partition or device to Ambient, make it dissapear instead of having it iconfied as a separate dir?

Say, I am downloading to ram:, double click ram icon, iconify it and there you go, you have 2 ram accesses on Ambient which is awkward. Yeah, I understand one icon is default access to a device/partition and the other a dir but, from a user pov, it's access to the exact same path. Discard the dir and keep the device/partition icon active only. Because if you do it a couple of times more, you may end up with a gazillion more same dir paths. Same goes to SYS or any other root path you may open and then iconify (work: games: etc).

This repeated iconfied behavior also affects dirs, which is even more awkward. Open SYS:C iconify, repeat process and you have 2 "C" drawers on Ambient which represent the exact same dir, wtf :/

Also, if you iconify a dir with same name but from different device, it doesn't get mentioned anywhere. Say you are in SYS:wbstartup and make a manual backup on nas:wbstartup. Iconify both wbstartups and there you have same name for different destination paths. Instead, the 2nd same named dir iconfied could get the device or partition name as bracket extension or dot ie wbstartup(NAS), wbstartup.NAS

Finally, is it possible to add a separate button on Ambient's lister where you open parent drawer in a new window? Perhaps with a hotkey combination, open parent behavior could be altered (click up arrow + LA or LALT or whatever). Checked iControl and couldn't spot anything like that.

@Cool_amigaN

Quote:

I do not mean to sound glib but, if you do not intent to have a window be iconified, have you considered to simply not iconify it?

Your argument is that developers should deliberately break the iconify functionality so iconify does no longer consistently iconify a window in order to make the behavior more "obvious" and "expected" from a user's perspective. I do not believe your suggestion will achieve what you think it would.

The key issue appears to be that you view an iconified Ambient window as a mere shortcut pointing to a specific path. However, this is incorrect. When you iconify an Ambient window, you merely hide a window and its entire state is being preserved, which includes information on whether it is in list or icon mode, whether all or only files with icons are being shown, and even what specific files are selected inside the window.

Having said this, there is some weird behavior in Ambient that is related to all of this. If you do iconify the SYS: device, clicking on the main SYS: device icon will bring back the iconified window (and its last state) rather than open a clean new window, which might have different default settings and would have no files already selected. The only way to get the default view of SYS: in an Ambient window is to first open "My MorphOS" and then navigate to SYS:, which I would say is a bit weird and clunky.

Like the MacOS finder, Ambient appears to assume that users are senile and forgot they already had a specific device open in another window, thus will refuse to open an additional window so it makes you unnecessarily go through "My MorphOS", which I do not think is a better approach.